VIIRS_NPP-OSPO-L3U-v2.60_1

PODAAC-GHVRS-3UO26

Version 1

AbstractThe Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS), starting with S-NPP launched on 28 October 2011, is the new generation of the US Polar Operational Environmental Satellites (POES). The Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (S-NPP) is a collaboration between NASA and NOAA. The ACSPO SNPP/VIIRS L3U (Level 3 Uncollated) product is a gridded version of the ACSPO SNPP/VIIRS L2P product available here https://podaac.jpl.nasa.gov/dataset/VIIRS_NPP-OSPO-L2P-v2.60. The L3U output files are 10-minute granules in netCDF4 format, compliant with the GHRSST Data Specification version 2 (GDS2). There are 144 granules per 24hr interval, with a total data volume of 500MB/day. Fill values are reported at all invalid pixels, including pixels with >5 km inland. For each valid water pixel (defined as ocean, sea, lake or river, and up to 5 km inland), the following layers are reported: SSTs, ACSPO clear-sky mask (ACSM; provided in each grid as part of l2p_flags, which also includes day/night, land, ice, twilight, and glint flags), NCEP wind speed, and ACSPO SST minus reference (Canadian Met Centre 0.1deg L4 SST; available at https://podaac.jpl.nasa.gov/dataset/CMC0.1deg-CMC-L4-GLOB-v3.0). Only L2P SSTs with QL=5 were gridded, so all valid SSTs are recommended for the users. Per GDS2 specifications, two additional Sensor-Specific Error Statistics layers (SSES bias and standard deviation) are reported in each pixel with valid SST. The ACSPO VIIRS L3U product is monitored and validated against iQuam in situ data (Xu and Ignatov, 2014) in SQUAM (Dash et al, 2010).